A Complete Bibliography of
Gilbert
Shelton's "Wonder Wart-Hog",
from the first grunts in 1962 up to the
latest adventures.

Also known as "Wonder Warthog",
just because that's the way it's usually spelled, and people don't
remember the hyphen.

The
first Wonder Wart-Hog story, in
the Austin Bacchanal.

Wonder
Wart-Hog at the peak of his
powers (1967).

For reasons I
can't fathom, there is no complete
source of titles for Gilbert Shelton's remarkable underground comic
"Wonder Wart-Hog". Until now. I've been collecting WW stories, in
original and reprinted editions, for
several years now, and believe I have compiled an (almost) complete
bibliography of the stories. I say "almost" because it seems that there
were many regional underground weeklies that ran some of the WW stories
in
the 1970s, and which are almost impossible to track down. I have
included all those titles I could find, but I feel certain that
there are others. There are also a couple of gaps where I have found
references to a WW story in a particular magazine, but was unable to
determine exactly which story it was. Or, I have found references to a
story
title but can't find where it was published. If you have additions or
corrections, I'd gladly incorporate them if you'll mail them to me
(address at the bottom of the page).

Justification for this madness: The artwork of
Gilbert Shelton and Tony
Bell in the Drag Cartoons era
was a huge influence on my own style. I drew a lot of wart-hog
cartoons, in a style shamelessly stolen from these stories, in the late
1960s. Of
course, I later recognized the similarity to other classic styles. (I'm
sure Gilbert and Tony were as fascinated by John Tenniel's
illustrations for "Alice in Wonderland" as I was, or maybe it was Jack
Davis in Mad).
And the humor (written
by Shelton and Joe Brown) was a weird blend of awful puns, shaggy dog
plots and sophisticated news references. The
combination of that frenetic cross-hatched madness and pun-ridden,
slapstick social commentary made a lasting impression on me.
I still laugh out loud when I read some of the old stories, and I offer
my
highest praise to Shelton for his satiric 2004 look at "homeland
security", "The Wart-Hog that Came In from the Cold". (Of
course, he doesn't have to live with it, lucky bastard.)

It has been pointed out to me that Shelton wasn't alone in this
undertaking. He certainly had a lot of good help: Joe Brown wrote and
Tony Bell drew with or for him on many stories. The ones where all
three are credited are arguably the pinnacle of WW's career. But it's
hard to tell where Gilbert left off and the others began. That 2004
story has the look and feel of the classic stuff, but both Tony and Joe
were gone by then. Al Capp got the credit for Frank Frazetta's work on
"Li'l Abner", VT Hamlin got credit for Dave Graue's, etc. Though the
Austin hippie scene was way different than a commercial art studio and
was probably much more collaborative, I'll continue the tradition of
crediting Shelton with setting the tone, laying out the stories,
developing the style.

If you want to
immerse yourself in that style, here's your map.

I'm not going to spend time making this page eye
candy. It's for
reference. Please refer to it often. Maybe one day I'll make it a
timeline, rather than organized by titles.
-- Vance Bass

First
storiesThe
University of Texas has an illustrious tradition of satirical
magazines, as well as of producing noteworthy cartoonists
(Shelton,
Frank Stack, Berke Brethed, et al.). The Bacchanal
and Texas Ranger both
featured art by
Shelton and gave birth to the fearless, fighting, foulmouthed
Hog of
Steel.

Harvey
Kurtzman's Help!
Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was the genius behind Mad
magazine and the long-running Playboy feature
"Little
Annie Fanny", as well as several lesser-known magazines. Among
those, Help!
was the longest lived, running from 1960 to 1965. Kurtzman was a
mentor
to many developing artists like Terry Giliiam and R. Crumb, and
ran
cartoons from college mags around the US. Thus, Wonder Wart-Hog
made
his first nationally distributed appearance in the pages of Help!

Pete Millar was an
incredibly prolific cartoonist and publisher, churning out much of the
artwork for several magazines during the mid-to-late 1960s. He also
used some other top-notch illustrators like Alex Toth and, of course,
Gilbert Shelton. The stories in Drag
Cartoons represent the
largest group published in one place and also show the maturing of
Gilbert's style. Surely, working with Tony Bell and Joe E Brown, Jr
must have had an influence on this style, but it's clear that the
basics were there before and the polish remained after his work with
these collaborators.

Millar also produced two issues of the Wonder
Wart-Hog Quarterly. There were two because publishing
lead times meant that he didn't discover it was a flop until the second
issue was already printed. Millar took a huge loss on the magazine, as
well as on the even more esoteric Big Daddy Roth magazine.
These failures almost bankrupted him, and caused him to sell the
rights to Drag
Cartoons to his printer
and leave the country for a time with his family. Shelton, however,
forged ahead with WW in other venues.

CD-ROM
Pete
Millar also collected every WW story he had published on a CD-ROM. This
is no longer listed on the Millar
Publishing web site, but his daughter
told me in mid-2005 that they still had them. Get one now. This is the definitive collection
of the Drag Cartoons era WW.

Racin'
Toons, No. 6 (Aug. 1971)

"The Name Game" (orig. in Drag
Cartoons 47, repr in Best
of WW Vol III)
This is a fairly obscure magazine for which Millar did apparently did
occasional artwork after he returned from overseas. Issue No. 6 is the
only one I have found with WW material.

Other
Underground
Magazines
Pete Millar's misfortune left Gilbert Shelton looking for an outlet
just as the hippie scene began to flourish. Shelton joined Robert
Crumb
and other pioneers in creating the
so-called "underground comix" genre. These were comics that catered
to
the youthful stoners of the day, with stories about politics, drugs,
sex, and Wart-Hogs.
For a while, the ability to break comics taboos was tested with
exuberance that often exceeded the bounds of good taste. The low point
must surely have been "Wonder Wart-Hog Breaks Up the Muthalode Smut
Ring", featuring a brutal sexual assault purporting to be the gag at
the end. Luckily, the appeal of that direction wore off quickly,
perhaps helped along by the legal troubles caused by the smut ring
story. After publishing in Zap for a while, Shelton started Rip-Off
(named after the press he co-founded) and continued the WW saga there.
Interestingly, the five-part "Battle of the Titans", started in
Millar's quarterly, but left dangling after two installments, was
finished in Rip-Off
and later collected
into a separate title.

Zap Comix #3 (1968) "69 Issue". Wonder Blows an Easy
One

Zap Comix #4 (1968) WW Breaks Up the Muthalode Smut
Ring and Also 'Balls' Lois Lamebrain (This Zap
is still banned by Canadian
customs for obscenity.)

Nasty Tales No 2 (UK, Aug 1971) "WW and the Invasion
of
the Pigs from Uranus!" (repr from Hydrogen Bomb Funnies)

Funnybook
#1 (San
Francisco, Almighty Publishing Co., 1971) "Hero of the Beach". A
one-page throwaway of about the same low quality as as the "Smut Ring"
story. A very obscure comik, and deservedly so.